Shervin Assari

By Shervin Assari

While studies have indicated an association between socioeconomic status (SES) and neuroimaging measures, weaker SES effects are shown for Blacks than Whites. This is, in part, due to processes such as stratification, racism, minoritization, and othering of Black people in the United States. However, less is known about Latino youth. This study had two aims: First, to test the association between parental education and the right and left nucleus accumbens (NAcc) resting-state functional connectivity with the frontoparietal network (FPN) in children; and second, to investigate ethnic heterogeneity in this association. This cross-sectional study used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. We analyzed the resting-state functional connectivity data (rsFC) of 10,840 US preadolescents who were between 9 and 10 years old. The main outcomes were the NAcc resting-state functional connectivity with FPN separately calculated for right and left hemispheres. Parental education was our independent variable. Family structure, sex, and age were covariates. Furthermore, ethnicity (Latino vs. non-Latino) was regarded as the moderator. We used mixed-effects regression for data analysis with and without interaction terms between parental education and ethnicity. Most participants (n = 8690; 80.2%) were non-Latino and 2150 (19.8%) were Latino. Parental education was associated with higher right and left NAcc resting-state functional connectivity with FPN. Ethnicity showed statistically significant interactions with parental education, suggesting that the positive associations between parental education and right and left NAcc resting-state functional connectivity with FPN were different in non-Latino and Latino children. For right hemisphere, we found significantly stronger and for left hemisphere, we found significantly weaker association for Latino compared with non-Latino preadolescents. Preadolescents’ NAcc resting-state functional connectivity with FPN depends on the intersections of ethnicity, parental education, and laterality.

Part of the book: Parenting